Launched on September 17, 2011, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a movement
whose activism is planned and coordinated via a free, open-source
social-networking website that is maintained by an independent group of organizers who describe themselves as “committed to doing technical support work for resistance movements.” Strongly anti-capitalist, OWS characterizes
America as a “ruthless,” materialistic society where the chief
objective is to “always minimize costs and maximize profits”; where
“lives are commodities to be bought and sold on the open market”; and
where “the economic transaction has become the dominant way of relating
to the culture and artifacts of human civilization.” The “deep spiritual
sickness” that necessarily results from this repugnant philosophy of
perpetual economic "growth for the sake of growth," says OWS, has caused “vast deprivation, oppression and despoliation ... to cover the world.” OWS's prescribed remedy is to replace the foregoing arrangement “with a society of cooperation and community” – i.e., a socialist economy.

Lasn
reports
that in mid-2011 he and his fellow
Adbusters staffers,
“inspired” by the
events
of the Arab Spring, “thought that America” was likewise “ripe
for this type of [mass] rage.” “Deep
in recession and with scary ecological scenarios looming,” said
Adbusters, “now may be the ripest moment we’ll ever have to
power-shift global capitalism onto a new sustainable path.”

Further,
Lasn wasconfident
that young Americans' “despondency” over such concerns as
“climate change,” “corruption in Washington,” and the
“decline” of their country, would significantly increase the
likelihood that the U.S. might experience “a Tahrir moment”
of
sorts—i.e.,
an opportunity for revolutionary change. (The reference was to Tahrir
Square, a Cairo plaza that was a key site during the dramatic events of the
Egyptian Revolution in early 2011.) Emboldened also by “that
sort of anarchy cred”
which the civil disobedience/“hacktivism”
group Anonymous had been demonstrating in recent times, Lasn and his
Adbusters associates brainstormed
ideas for effecting “some kind of a soft regime change” that
would diminish the political influence of “finances,”
“lobbyists,” and “corporations.” On June 9, 2011, Lasn
registered
the domain name
“OccupyWallStreet.org” and thus gave birth to the movement which
he hoped
would help “pull
the current monster down”­—i.e.,
the two-headed serpent of capitalism and consumerism.

America was struggling through a lingering economic crisis at that time, something
which radicals have always recognized as fertile soil for the seeds of
revolution. But another key factor was in play as well: A relentless class-warfare narrative had already been injected into the
political air by
Barack
Obama.
Seeking to lay the groundwork for his reelection, the President was
actively suggesting that the nation's economic recession was not so much a
result of ill-advised government policies, but rather of capitalism's
inherent excesses, which could be reined in only by a powerful and
benevolent central government. Thus had Obama articulated a host of
disparaging public
references
to such villains as the “millionaires
and billionaires,” the “corporate
jet owners,”
and the “fat
cat bankers on Wall Street”
who allegedly were not paying their “fair share” in taxes—and
who were thereby exploiting “working families” and the poor.
These themes would become central to the message of OWS,
and
Obama
himself would state
that
he “understand[s] the frustrations that are being expressed” by
the protesters.

On July 13, 2011, Lasn and Adbusters posted
an “Occupy Wall Street” call-to-action
recruiting
“redeemers,
rebels and radicals” to join a mass protest movement “against the
greatest corrupter
of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.”
This rallying cry would prove to be what Adbusters
contributor David Graeber called the “magical
spark”
capable of igniting a revolution.

The revolutionary tactic of choice, said
Adbusters, would be
“a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas
[protesters who camped out for extended periods in public spaces] of
Spain,” whereby demonstrators would “go out and seize a square of
singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make
it happen.” Toward that end, Adbusters exhorted
its supporters to prepare to “flood into lower Manhattan” on
September 17 and “set up tents, kitchens,
peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months”—and
to
do so “with
a vengeance.”

According
to Lasn and Adbusters
,
“Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a
straightforward ultimatum­—that
Mubarak must go­—over
and over again until they won.” Following that model, Adbusters
instructed its recruits to likewise “incessantly
repeat
one simple demand in a plurality of voices.” But that demand,
explained
an Adbusters communique to
“radicals
and utopian dreamers,”
would have to be carefully worded so as to conceal its deeper
motives:

"Strategically
speaking,
there is a very real danger that if we naively put our cards on the
table and rally around the 'overthrow of capitalism' or some equally
outworn utopian slogan, then our Tahrir
moment
will quickly fizzle into another inconsequential ultra-lefty
spectacle soon forgotten."

To
guard against this possibility, Lasn knew
that his organization would need to articulate “a deceptively
simple Trojan Horse demand” that was “so specific and doable”
that it would be “impossible for President
Obama
to ignore.” Soon thereafter, under the slogan “Democracy Not
Corporatocracy,” Adbusters demanded
that Obama “ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the
influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”

Lasn's
“Trojan Horse” tactic adhered faithfully to the methods of the
famed community organizer Saul
Alinsky, whose
preferred brand of revolution was a slow, patient process of
incremental, rather than sudden, transformation. As author Stanley
Kurtz explains, Alinsky “was smart enough to avoid Marxist language
in public.... Instead of calling for the overthrow of the
bourgeoisie, [he] and his followers talk about 'confronting power.'
Instead of advocating socialist revolution, they demand 'radical
social change.' Instead of demanding attacks on capitalists, they go
after 'targets' or 'enemies.'”

KEY INFLUENCES

Wade Rathke
The
call-to-action issued by Kalle Lasn and Adbusters built upon groundwork that
other leading leftists and radicals had been laying for decades. One
of those luminaries was the neo-communistWade
Rathke, founder of ACORN. According
to journalist Aaron Klein,
the launch of OWS represented “the culmination” of an
“anti-banking
jihad”
that Rathke
had heralded in a March 2011 call for “days of rage in ten cities
around JP Morgan Chase.” Not coincidentally, OWS's inaugural event
on September 17 was widely
dubbed
a “Day of Rage” and was conducted in conjunction with an
affiliated movement known as USDayOfRage,
named after a
series
of Weatherman-inspired
anti-Vietnam War protests in Chicago in 1969.

Stephen Lerner
Rathke's
radical efforts were aided
by SEIUboard
member Stephen
Lerner, a leftist organizer who aims, by exploiting the "transformative stage of what's happening in
capitalism," to “literally
cause a new financial crisis,” “bring
down the stock market,” and “interfere” with wealthy people's
“ability to be rich.” Paraphrasing
Saul Alinsky,
in March 2011 Lerner said of the wealthy: “We have to politically isolate them, economically isolate them,
and disrupt them.” He then revealed
that “a bunch of us around the country” had “decided” that JP
Morgan Chase “would be a really good company to hate.” As a
result, he said,
“we are going to roll out over the next couple of months what will
hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is
really about challenge the power of Wall Street.”

By waging such “brave and heroic battles challenging
the power of the giant corporations,” Lerner hoped
“to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and
power” in the United States. On September 10—just
a week before the first Occupy Wall Street event in Manhattan—
Lerner revealed his connection to OWS when he
foretold
that
demonstrations would be staged “in Seattle, in L.A., in San
Francisco, in Chicago, in New York, in Boston.” “We've got some
stuff in Boston and New York that's going to really be spectacular,”
he emphasized.
“This is about building and creating power,” Lerner added.
“We're not going to convince the other side that we're right
through intellectual argument. We need to create power, and in a way
we need to talk about how we create a crisis for the super
rich.”

Lisa Fithian
In
the pantheon of OWS luminaries, no one occupies a higher position
than Lisa
Fithian, a
legendary community organizer
who specializes in aggressive
“direct action” tactics and, as journalist Byron York puts
it,
“operates in the world of anti-globalism anarchists, antiwar
protesters, and union activists.”

In 1999 Fithian was a key
organizer
of the chaotic anti-globalization demonstrations which devolved into
violent riots and caused the shutdown of the
World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings
in Seattle. Fithian would later say,
reflectively, that she and her fellow Seattle protesters “were
going after the capitalist system, the neo-liberal system.”

Fithian says
that she and others “who are trying to create a new world ... have to
dismantle or transform the old order” which is dominated
by “the corporations [and] the big banks [that] have been
destroying this country.” In an effort to fulfill her moral
“obligation” to “undo all the oppression” that exists in
American society, she seeks
to “create crisis, because crisis is that edge where change is
possible.” Armed with this mindset, Fithian quickly emerged as the
top street-level organizer
of the OWS movement and
its various urban chapters.

UNDERSTANDING OWS

Describing
itself as a “leaderless resistance movement” composed of “people
of many colors, genders and political persuasions” whose goal was to use
“the revolutionary Arab
Spring
tactic” to create
“an
American Tahrir Square,” OWS portrayed
itself from the outset as an organic, spontaneous eruption of popular
sentiment propelled only by the passionate commitment of its
grassroots supporters. For the most part, the movement's admirers in
the media and elsewhere echoed that narrative: Fox News commentator
Juan
Williamsaffirmed
that OWS was both “spontaneous” and “organic.” New
York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman characterized it as part of a worldwide
pattern of “spontaneous
social protests.” And congresswoman
Nancy
Pelosilauded
the movement as “young,” spontaneous,” and “focused.”

OWS claimed
to be “fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and
multinational corporations over the democratic process,” and
against “the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse
that has caused the greatest recession in generations.” Moreover,
the movement sought
“to
expose how the richest 1% of people who are writing the rules of the
global economy are imposing an agenda of neoliberalism and economic
inequality that is foreclosing our future.” “We
Are The 99%
that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,”
said
OWS. Aiming
to bring the despised one-percenters to justice by “creat[ing]
real change from the bottom up,” OWS declared that “the only
solution
is World Revolution.”

OWS's
initial “Call
to Action”—dated
September 17, 2011 (the day of the movement's first mass gathering)—was
alternatively dubbed a
“call for revolution” whose intent was to collapse “the capitalist
political system” where “inequality” between the “have[s] and
have nots” had unjustly enabled the former “to rule, whether by the sword
or by the dollar.” To wage this revolution, OWS called for
“protests to organize and disrupt the system”; “for workers to
not only strike, but seize their workplaces collectively”; and for
students and teachers together “to seize the classrooms” and
“free minds together” by “teach[ing] democracy”—a
politically expedient euphemism
for “socialism.”

As a consequence of these core OWS values, posters and
t-shirts bearing anti-capitalist slogans would become ubiquitous at
“Occupy” rallies across the United States.
Theseincluded
such slogans
as: “Smash Capitalism”; “Capitalism Isn't Working”; “Death
to Capitalism”; “Capitalism = Systematic Exploitation”; and
“F*** Capitalism.” Some related themes, equally
representative of OWS's prevailing mood, included: “Tax the Filthy
Rich”; “Eat the Rich”; “Taxidermy
the Rich”;
“Declare War on Banks”; “Nationalize the Banks”; “Turn
Workers' Anger into Communist Revolution”; “This is the
Revolution”; “Worker-Communism Unity”; “Try Socialism”;
“Viva la Revolucion”; “No War but Class War”; and the very
creed of Marxism: “From Each According to His Ability, to Each
According to His Need.”

On
September 29, 2011, the
NYC
General Assembly—OWS's
main
decision-making body—adopted
its official “Declaration
of the Occupation of New York City,”
condemning banks and other corporations for having placed
“profit over
people,” “self-interest over justice,” and “oppression over
equality.” This Declaration, which stands as OWS's most important
internal document, levies a host of specific and serious
charges, though it adheres to the movement's policy of refraining
from issuing any formal demands related to those charges. In the
Declaration:

OWS accuses
banks and corporations of having
“donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible
for regulating them.”[1]

OWS accuses
corporations
of having “influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as
people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.”[2]

OWS accuses
corporations of perpetuating “inequality and discrimination in the
workplace.”[3]

OWS accuses
corporations of denying employees “the right to negotiate for
better pay and safer working conditions.”[4]

OWS
accuses
banks of holding
“students
hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which
is itself a human right.”[5]

OWS accuses
corporate America of “block[ing]
alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.”[6]

In
addition,
the
OWS Declaration accuses corporations of such transgressions as:
poisoning Americans' food supply “through negligence”;
undermining the farming system “through monopolization”;
profiting from animal cruelty; using the military and the police “to
prevent freedom of the press”; deliberately failing to recall
dangerous products so as to preserve their own profits; perpetuating
“colonialism at home and abroad”; participating in “the torture
and murder of innocent civilians overseas”; and “creat[ing]
weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government
contracts.”

On
October 2, 2011, New
York
magazine published the
results of a poll
it had conducted with 100 committed OWS protesters in
Manhattan, half of whom were in their twenties. Of those who rendered
opinions on the particular questions they were asked, 45% said that
capitalism “can’t be saved” and is “inherently immoral,”
while 35% said the U.S. government is “no better than, say, Al
Qaeda.”

In another
October 2011 survey
of 200 OWS protesters, 65%
said that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all
citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a
secure retirement—regardless of the cost; 77% supported tax hikes
on the wealthiest Americans; 52% had participated in political
movements before; 98% endorsed civil disobedience to achieve their
goals; and 31% said they would support violence to promote their
agendas. Pollster
Doug Schoen,
whose firm conducted this latter survey, concluded
that OWSers hold “values that are dangerously out of touch with the
broad mass of the American people … and are bound by a deep
commitment to radical left-wing policies.” OWS
organizer John McGloin himself confirmed
that people who are not “socialist[s] or...anarchist[s]” are
“under-represented at OWS.”

Conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart depicted the OWS protesters as "the same types of groups [as] the anti-WTO crowd that in 1999 attacked Seattle"; "the same group of people that created 'Camp Casey'
at President Bush's compound ... in Crawford, Texas"; and members of
"the anti-war movement" who have "now been co-opted as a means to divert
attention away from the Tea Party and on to an organization that shifts
[onto the banks] the blame from the government for giving ...
out-of-control loans to their political cronies." "It is a sleight of
hand for the benefit of the Democratic Party and for the benefit of President Obama," Breitbart elaborated, "to change the onus away from the government policies that created our failed economic system."

In
October 2011, Breitbart's website BigGovernment.com reported that it had
succeeded in acquiring a vast
archive
of leaked emails containing messages
exchanged by left-wing activists during their “strategic and daily
tactical planning of the 'Occupy Wall Street' and broader 'Occupy'
campaign this fall.” These emails document
what BigGov describes as the extensive “involvement of socialists,
anarchists, and other radicals,” as well as “heavy union
involvement,” in the OWS movement. Further, the emails show that
OWS aims
to promote extreme levels of economic and governmental
destabilization; to create social unrest throughout the democratic
world; and to form alliances with other radical causes, including the
anti-Israel movement. Most notably, a number of the emails discuss
how a “Trojan Horse” strategy—as
identified
by Kalle Lasn—could
be employed to deceive
the public about the Occupy movement's real agendas. As OWS organizer
John McGloin explained
in one email:

“[F]irst
you get large numbers of people to join by showing how reasonable you
are....[I]f you talk about overthrowing governments, capitalism or
wholesale changes, most of the 99% will be scared off, and we’ll
never have the power we need to affect real change. In order to fight
the global corporations I estimate we need a minimum of 15 million
Americans on the street. There are not 15 million radical
socialist/anarchists in the US. We need people without political
agendas, but with anger at corporations.”

Among
the most significant of the leaked emails was a
manifesto
written by Adbusters senior editor Micah White, in which, as The
Daily Caller
reports, “she betrayed the beginnings of a more ambitious social
agenda than one merely concerned with banking and Wall Street
regulation.” While the manifesto cannot be considered an official
OWS document, its contents offer a revealing window into the
movement's major objectives:
an end to foreclosures for the unemployed, sick and elderly; the
enactment of a tax on the wealthiest 1% to fund public services; the
forgiveness of all student loan debt; the implementation of a
worldwide
1%
“Robin Hood” tax on all financial transactions and currency
trades, the revenues of which could be used to fund social-welfare
programs and combat climate change; the
arrest and prosecution
of “the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 meltdown”;
and an end to “the influence corporate money has on our elected
representatives.”

VIOLENCE, ARRESTS, AND THE OCCUPATIONS

The
OWS movement's first large-scale clash with law-enforcement occurred
on October
1, 2011, when a horde of demonstrators shut down traffic on the
Brooklyn Bridge for two-and-a-half hours, a move that resulted in
some 700
arrests.
It should be noted that getting
arrested is a calculated OWS tactic; the movement's organizers
commonly select their “arrestables”—i.e.,
people
who project a desired image or demeanor—in
advance of a direct action. This
is essentially a prescription from the Saul
Alinsky playbook, which emphasizes the inspiration that a group
can experience when some of its members—particularly
key figures—are
“willing
to suffer imprisonment for the cause.”

Another
landmark date for OWS was October 15, when rallies were held in many
hundreds of cities
around the world. Violence broke out most notably in Rome, where tens
of thousands
of protesters converged. According
to a Reuters report:
“Hundreds of hooded, masked demonstrators rampaged in some of the
worst violence seen in the Italian capital in years, setting cars
ablaze, breaking bank and shop windows and destroying traffic lights
and signposts.” Meanwhile, 175
protesters were arrested in Chicago and 92
were arrested in New York.

The mayhem of October 15 offered evidence that although OWS had
publicly
professed,
at its inception,
to “encourage
the use of nonviolence,” by no means does the movement uniformly
deem violence off-limits. No less a personage than OWS organizer Lisa
Fithian, who cites
the late-19th and early-20th century
anarchist movement in Spain as
her inspiration, has candidly declared: “I
am not a pacifist.… I
was raised in this culture, which is a very violent culture and I
understand that I have some violence in who I am.” Moreover, Fithian
once told
the Internationalist
Socialist Review:

“I have no issue with property destruction. I think sometimes it's
appropriate, sometimes it's not. Again, I look at it strategically.
Does this help us or does it hurt us? Does it help us achieve our
goal, or does it not? We're in a society where property is idolized,
so a lot of people don't get it yet that it doesn't really matter.
It's just glass or products.”

Likewise
intimating that violence might become more widespread as the OWS
movement continued to gain momentum, a featured speaker at an October
2011 “Occupy L.A.” rally praised
the French Revolution of 1789 for having “made fundamental
transformation,” even though “it was bloody.”
“[U]ltimately,” the speaker told
the cheering
crowd,
“the bourgeoisie won’t go without violent means.... Long live
revolution! Long live socialism!”

Violence
and other forms of criminality
indeed became commonplace at OWS demonstrations. Among the many
documented transgressions: vandalism, extortion, assault, theft, trespass,
rape, rioting, computer hacking, sexual perversions, knife attacks, threatened violence, civil disobedience, the use and trafficking of illegal drugs,
and public urination and
defecation.
One cursory search of news stories reporting criminal behavior at OWS
locations found hundreds of such incidents
which had occurred as of November 22, 2011. As of November 15, at
least 4,049 OWS protesters had been arrested nationwide.

Perhaps the most notable crime committed at an OWS site was a November 10 homicide, where a 25-year-old
protester at Occupy Oakland was shot
and killed by a man whom other demonstrators described as
a “frequent resident” at the camp. Numerous brutal sexual
assaults were reported at OWS sites as well, during October and November 2011. At Occupy
Cleveland, for instance, a 19-year-old woman was raped
while she was inside her tent. At Occupy
Baltimore, a woman was raped and robbed by an assailant who
subsequently escaped without detection. In New
York, an 18-year-old woman was raped by a 26-year-old man who had
been
working at the protesters’ makeshift kitchen at Zuccotti Park. In
yet another New
York incident, a female protester was sexually assaulted inside
her tent early one morning. In Texas, police
initiated an investigation of reports that a 14-year-old girl had
been raped by an adult male at the Occupy
Dallas encampment.
Yet another sexual assault was reported at the Occupy
Lawrence camp in Kansas. A woman at Occupy
St. Louis was raped on November 8, and five days later a
23-year-old woman was raped by a 50-year-old man at Occupy
Philadelphia. Nor were such heinous crimes confined solely to OWS
sites in the United States. Indeed, a
female resident of the Occupy
Glasgow camp in Scotland was sexually assaulted in her tent on
October 26.

At
the Occupy Phoenix site,
copies of an “informational” document were distributed to “educate” protesters vis à vis the possible
efficacy of violence directed against police officers. Asserting that
“far more injustice, violence, torture, theft, and outright murder
has been committed IN THE NAME [emphasis original] of 'law
enforcement' than has been committed in spite of it,” the document
advised:

“When those violently victimizing the innocent have
badges, become a cop-killer....The next time you hear of a police
officer being killed 'in the line of duty,' take a moment to consider
the very real possibility that maybe in that case, the 'law enforcer'
was the bad guy and the 'cop killer' was the good guy.”

In
late October 2011, violence erupted when officials in Oakland,
California
sought
to
remove OWSers from the plaza surrounding City Hall, so as to give
municipal workers an opportunity to clean up the mounds of garbage
and filth that had accumulated there. When many of the protesters
ignored repeated instructions that they vacate the plaza, police were
dispatched to clear out the
site. Undeterred, a mob of roughly 400
people
armed
with rocks and bottles tried to reoccupy the plaza by
force,
provoking clashes with riot police. Some
protesters
threw paint at the officers’ faces while chanting, “This is why
we call you pigs!” Ultimately, 85 provocateurs were arrested, and
some had to be subdued
with clubs and pepper-spray. But again, this was a calculated part of
OWS's plan. Kalle
Lasn
himself had acknowledged
that “police
brutality
actually helps the movement” by drawing media attention; even false
allegations and provoked confrontations can serve that same purpose.

Oakland was once
more the scene of violence
on November
2, 2011, when hundreds of OWS demonstrators started a large bonfire in the middle of a downtown
street and
successfully shut down operations at one of America's busiest
shipping ports. Moreover, a mob of some 300
protesters smashed
the windows of a Wells Fargo bank while chanting, “Banks got bailed
out. We got sold out.” The protesters also spray-painted an
expletive on the bank's exterior wall and blocked the front door of a
nearby Citibank. Police
in riot gear cleared out the area, but soon thereafter many OWSers
returned to the scene to march and chant defiantly: “Whose streets?
Our streets!” The Oakland violence came just two days after United
Steelworkers international president Leo
Gerard, an advisor to President Obama and a board member
of several George Soros-funded organizations, had called for “more
militancy”
in the OWS movement.

A number of OWS protests across the U.S. severely
disrupted the lives of residents and merchants in the vicinity.
Consider the case of Marc Epstein, proprietor of a
normally bustling Wall Street cafe
which suffered a dramatic loss of business as a direct result of OWS
activities and was forced to lay off 21 employees within the first
six weeks of the protests.
In
early November, four elected
officials representing Lower Manhattan complained
that the OWS demonstrations were creating “serious quality-of-life
concerns” for residents of the area. A member of New York's
Community Board stated,
“It’s
a crime scene down there, and it’s attracting all of the worst
people in this city. We’re hearing reports of rapes, assaults,
violence, drug use. The mentally ill are assembling. It’s a public
hazard.” Moreover, complaints
about vandalism, theft, and public urination and defecation were
widespread. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg lamented,
“This
isn’t an occupation of Wall Street. It’s an occupation of a
growing, vibrant residential neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, and
it’s really hurting small businesses and families.”

ANTI-SEMITISM AT OWS

Significant
displays of anti-Semitism
have been evident at “Occupy” events in various cities, where
posters and chanted slogans
denouncing
the alleged conspiracies of “Jewish bankers,” “Wall
Street Jews,”
“Jewish billionaires,” and
“Zionist
Jews”
square neatly with OWS's relentless condemnations of “greedy Wall
Street bankers” and thus go
unchallenged
by others in the protesting throngs. Likewise, many of the posters
displayed at OWS rallies feature caricatures
of Jewish bankers bearing a striking resemblance to the propaganda
art that was once produced in Nazi Germany. According to the American Nazi Party, which
supports OWS, the movement strikes a welcome blow against an obscenely
corrupt "Judeo-Capitalism."

New
York OWS protester Danny Cline, dubbing himself “Lotion Man,”
gained considerable YouTube notoriety in October 2011 when he angrily
derided
an elderly Jew with such taunts as “You're a bum, Jew”; “Go
back to Israel”; and “You got the money…Jewish man.” Another
New York protester stated:
“The small ethnic Jewish population in this country, they have a
firm grip on America's media [and] finances.”

At Occupy Chicago, featured
speaker Hatem
Abudayyeh,
executive
director of the Arab-American
Action Network
(which
was founded by the
radical PLO propagandist Rashid
Khalidi),
told
a cheering crowd that “Israel is beginning to be seen as the
criminal pariah state that it is.” Soon thereafter, Abudayyeh,
whose home
was raided
by the FBI in 2009
on suspicion of his ties to terrorist groups like Hamas and the
Colombian F.A.R.C., led fellow OWSers in chants of “Free, Free
Palestine!”

At
an Occupy L.A. rally, Los
Angeles Unified School District employee Patricia McAllister told
a television reporter: “I think that the Zionist Jews who are
running these big banks and our Federal Reserve … need to be run out
of this country.” After McAllister's school district subsequently
fired her for her comments, the woman publicly defended
and amplified her positions: “I
think that we should be able to [tell] the truth about what the Jews
are doing to this nation, the Zionist Jews, how they control the
money system, how they control the markets and everything else.… Jews
have been run out of 109 countries throughout history. And we need to
run them out of this one.” McAllister said all this while an Occupy
L.A. spokeswoman stood silently nearby,
listening. Yet the latter steadfastly refused
to condemn
McAllister's rhetoric, maintaining that it “doesn't erode our
[movement's] credibility, not one bit.”

At an Occupy Boston
rally in early November 2011, a contingent
of protesters marched into the lobby of the building that houses the
city's Israeli consulate and held a sit-in, chanting
such slogans as: “Hey hey, Ho ho! Israeli apartheid's got to go!”;
“Long live the Intifada!”;
“Free, free Palestine!”; “Viva viva
Palestina!”; “Not another nickel, Not another dime! No more money
for Israel's crimes!”; and “Disarm the police, from Israel to
Greece!” This action had been planned in advance and was officially
sanctioned by Occupy Boston.

Some
noteworthy anti-Israel organizations have jumped
aboard the OWS bandwagon as well. For instance, the
activist group Jewish
Voice for
Peace,
which views Israel as morally analogous to apartheid South Africa,
distributed
flyers in Chicago bearing the headline:
“Refuse to Pay Taxes. Destroy Israel.” Another
group, the U.S.
Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, asserts
that
“the
connections between the struggles of Palestinians and the Occupy
movement are unmistakable: the spotlight on privilege and inequality,
the mass imprisonment, the police repression, and the people's
steadfastness.”

In
October 2011, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) claimed solidarity with the OWS movement in the United States. “Our
oppressors,” said
BNC, “whether
greedy corporations or military occupations, are united in profiting
from wars, pillage, environmental destruction, repression and
impoverishment. We must unite in our common quest for freedoms, equal
rights, social and economic justice, environmental sanity, and world
peace.” Further, BNC described
Palestinians as “part of the 99% around the world that suffer at
the hands of the 1% whose greed and ruthless quest for hegemony have
led to unspeakable suffering and endless war.”

Defenders of OWS maintain that it is unfair for critics to broadly smear the
movement as anti-Semitic merely because of the words and actions of
an allegedly small minority, or because of the endorsements of certain activist
groups. But what cannot be so easily dismissed is the fact that OWS
organizers and spokespeople have
elected
not to come forward and publicly condemn the anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Rather, like the aforementioned Occupy L.A. spokeswoman, they have
given their tacit approval to such sentiments—invariably
under the rubric of “free speech rights.” This presents a stark
contrast
to what occurred during the Tea Party demonstrations of 2010, where
participants would quickly confront,
denounce, and sometimes physically
banish
from their midst those rare individuals who tried
to promote a racist or otherwise objectionable message.

Further,
it is reasonable to speculate that the anti-Semitism on display at
OWS rallies may well reflect the sentiments of the movement's key figures. In 2004, for instance,
Kalle
Lasnwrote
a controversial Adbusters
article entitled “Why
Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?”—criticizing
America's most influential neoconservatives
and noting, derisively, that “half of them are Jewish.” And in
September 2011, Lasn praised
Palestinian leadership—which
had given no indication that it would abandon its longstanding quest
to destroy Israel—for
“moving
beyond the Israel- and U.S.-dominated peace process” and
“asking
the United Nations to formally recognize Palestine as an independent,
sovereign state within its 1967 borders.”

Lasn's Adbusters magazine has likewise made some extremely harsh assessments of Israel:

In
a June 2009 article/photo
montage
critiquing Israel's embargo of the Hamas-controlled
Gaza Strip, Adbusters likened Gaza to the Warsaw
ghetto
of the WWII era—suggesting that contemporary Jews' treatment of the
Palestinians resembled
the manner in which the Nazis had treated Jews under Hitler.

In an April 2011 article titled "Revolution
in America," Adbusters derided the United States' "corporate-backed rulers" for "cynically squandering billions of dollars of taxpayer money each year
in gifts to the apartheid state of Israel."

In
a January 2009 article titled "Enough
Boycott Israel,"Adbusters condemned the Jewish state's "increasingly
bloody occupation" and urged "the kind of
global [boycott, divestment and sanctions] movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa."

In a July 2007 article titled "Jazz
and the Jihad," Adbusters impugned "the Ziocons" for allegedly dictating American foreign policy while
turning a blind eye to "the colossal war crimes that are daily repeated
by
Israel in Palestine."

Lisa
Fithian, for her part, spent several weeks in 2003 working
with the International
Solidarity Movement
(ISM) in the Palestinian cities of Jenin and Nablus, where she acted
as a human shield seeking to prevent Israel's demolition of the homes
of Palestinian extremists and terrorists. (ISM actively cooperates
with such terrorist entities as Hamas,
the Palestinian
Islamic Jihad, and the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine.) At
a May 31, 2010 protest in Texas, Fithian publicly accused
Israel of “slaughter[ing] Palestinians every single day in Gaza and
the Occupied territories,” and called for “an end” to “the
U.S. tax dollars that fund that [Israeli] occupation.” During the
same event, fellow demonstrators chanted such slogans as “Long
live Intifada!” and “Palestine will be free, from the river to
the sea!”—unambiguous
calls for the dissolution of Israel.
Fithian is also a supporter of the pro-Hamas Free
Gaza Movement and was slated
to be a passenger in a June 2011 flotilla to Gaza, but the voyage was
ultimately cancelled.

ALLIES OF OWS

Take The Square
A
notable ally of OWS is an organization called Take
The Square (TTS), which aims
“to change an unfair system”—i.e.,
free-market capitalism and its “corporate
rule of our lives”—by
implementing “specific and feasible alternatives” that will
“improve life on this planet for all its inhabitants,”
particularly “the 99%” who “demand [their] share.” In Marxist
tradition, TTS proposes
“global ... solutions” that emphasize
“solidarity” among “human beings fighting and acting together
regardless of [geographic] borders.”

October 2011
Another staunch ally
of OWS is the Washington, DC-based October
2011 movement (O-2011), which, like Occupy Wall Street, views government rather
than the free market as the solution to every conceivable social ill.
Indeed, O-2011 calls
on the U.S. government to end all American economic policies “which foster a wealth
divide”; to “tax the rich and corporations” at especially high
rates so as to diminish the “significant
disparities of wealth”
that exist between the “extremely wealthy” and “the 99%”; to
create a single-payer healthcare system while expanding
social-welfare programs; to devote large sums of money to “creating
[public-sector] jobs” while eschewing “spending cuts”; to “end
corporate influence over the political process” by banning
corporate campaign contributions and establishing a publicly financed
campaign system; and to guarantee everyone “a sustainable living
wage” and a “publicly-funded” education from pre-school through
college.

ACORN and its Reincarnations
Operatives
of the now-defunct community organization ACORN,
which reconstituted itself into numerous state and regional
groups bearing a variety of different names,
have played a major
role
in organizing the OWS protests nationwide. For instance, the Working
Families Party
(WFP), a longtime ACORN front, helped
mobilize the demonstrations in New York City. WFP organizer Nelini
Stamp boasts
of her
organization's effort
to bring “revolutionary change” to “the capitalist system”
that is “not working for any of us.”

Newer ACORN offshoots are
likewise deeply involved with OWS. For instance, New York Communities
for Change (NYCC)—led
by longtime ACORN lobbyist Jon
Kest—has
helped
WFP organize
the demonstrations in lower Manhattan. In Pennsylvania, Action United
has participated
in the “Occupy Pittsburgh” rallies. In Florida, Organize Now
takes
part
in “Occupy Orlando.” The Alliance of Californians for Community
Empowerment helps
lead
the
“Occupy L.A.” protests. And New England United for Justice,
headed by former ACORN national president Maude
Hurd,
has participated
in the related “Take Back Boston” demonstrations in Massachusetts.

Fox News reports
that NYCC
hired approximately 100 former ACORN-affiliated staffers and paid
some of them $100 per day
to
attend and support OWS demonstrations. Further, NYCC recruited dozens
of people from New York homeless shelters and paid them $10 per hour
to support the protests in various ways, such as by serving as
door-to-door canvassers to collect money for the movement—sometimes
on false pretenses. According to an inside source, NYCC officials and top ex-ACORN
staffers had begun planning events like OWS in
February: “What people don’t understand is that ACORN is behind
this—and that this, what’s happening now, is all part of the …
plans to go after the banks, Chase in particular.”

Former
ACORN chief executive Bertha
Lewis has close
ties
to OWS
as well. Her new organization, The Black Institute (TBI), dubs
its protests “Occupy
Black America”
and “Occupy The Hood.” TBI and several other ACORN reincarnations
together organized
a noteworthy event known as “New Bottom Line,” a financial
protest aimed at persuading people to move their money out of major
banks on November 5, 2011. That auspicious date was selected because it is
known in the British Commonwealth as “Guy Fawkes Day,” named
in honor
of the man who attempted (unsuccessfully) to blow up Parliament and
thereby assassinate King James I in 1605. Fawkes
has become an
icon
of the Occupy demonstrations and the “Anonymous” hacker
collective,
thus accounting for the
large number of Guy Fawkes masks (popularized in the movie V
for Vendetta)
at OWS protests.

Communist Party USA
The
Communist
Party USA
(CPUSA) has also been involved in OWS's formation and early growth.
Working closely with "Occupy Los Angeles," for instance, are two
Southern California communists—veteran
Party leader Arturo Cambron and his comrade Mario Brito. In early
October 2011, Brito declared
that OWS was “an international movement” whose chief objective
was to achieve “economic justice” that would eliminate the
“income inequality” that “the vast majority of Americans”
view as “a major problem.” In an October 15, 2011 address
to the nearly 3,000 attendees
at an "Occupy Chicago" rally, John Bachtell, a spokesman from the
CPUSA's national board, conveyed
“greetings and solidarity from the Communist Party” and received
a number of loud ovations from the crowd.

Bill Ayers
Actively supporting
OWS is the infamous Bill
Ayers,
the unrepentant former Weather
Underground terrorist. Describing
the “Occupy” movement as a “North American Spring,” akin to
the “Arab Spring,” Ayers says: “These kinds of movements expand
our consciousness of what’s possible.” On October 19, 2011, Ayers led
a “teach-in” for "Occupy Chicago"
protesters on the tactics and history of “non-violent direct
action.” He also lauded
the protesters for their “brilliance”; condemned America's
“violent culture”; and derided the Tea Party movement as a
bastion of “jingoism,
nativism, racism.”

Rick Ayers
Ayers'
brother Rick, a radical teacher-education
professor based in San Francisco, likewise backs OWS and
wants
the Occupy movement's tactics to be “applied to schools.” He
wrote
in the Huffington
Post:
“The time has come for action. Take over these schools. Occupy
them. Sit in. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week....Instead of taking
marching orders from Wall Street, we need to take these schools and
make them institutions of liberation.” Ayers recommends, among
other things, the incorporation of “critical pedagogy,” an
educational philosophy based on Marxist theory, into school
curricula.

MoveOn.org
In
October 2011, the left-wing activist group MoveOn.org
announced its plan
to launch a protest movement of its own to complement “the amazing
work being done by brave Occupy Wall Street protesters,” to “end
the big banks’ excessive influence,” and “to Make Wall Street
Pay” for its transgressions against “economic justice.”

Labor Unions
OWS
has enjoyed strong support from many labor unions and federations
representing millions of public-sector workers, such as the AFL-CIO,
the AFSCME,
the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), and the United Federation
of Teachers. AFL-CIO president Richard
Trumka, who helped rescind a founding AFL-CIO rule which banned
Communist
Party
members and loyalists from leadership positions within the
Federation, says:
“We support the protesters in their determination to hold Wall
Street accountable and create good jobs…to call for fundamental
change.”

This type of union backing is quite understandable in light of the
dramatic leftward political shift which public-sector union leaders
have undergone during the past two decades. Ryan Lizza, associate
editor of The
New Republic,
notes for instance that today’s SEIU leaders “tend to be radical,
even socialist.” Because
public-sector workers get their money not from a free marketplace but
from taxes, their unions have a large incentive to advocate on behalf
of political leaders and causes that support higher taxes and bigger
government, which in turn can bankroll an ever-larger number of
public-sector union jobs. Such objectives
are entirely consistent with those of OWS.

National Lawyers Guild
Another
key OWS ally is the National
Lawyers Guild (NLG), from whose ranks emerged some 200
attorneys to serve as volunteer
legal observers
monitoring OWS events in New York; the Guild's objective is to find
evidence of police wrongdoing which can then be exploited for
propaganda purposes. Moreover, the NLG
provides legal representation for OWS protesters arrested across the
United States, and has set up “Occupy” legal
hotlines
in at least 19 cities. The significance of all this derives from the
NLG's radical history and deep communist ties.

Environmentalists
Hundreds of environmental
activists, convinced that capitalism is inherently destructive of the
natural world, have likewise joined OWS's crusade. Among the most
prominent is Bill
McKibben,
founder of 350.org,
who believes that humanity’s ever-increasing technological and
industrial progress corrupts the human spirit while endangering all
forms of life on the planet. Demanding that Congress place
restrictions
on carbon emissions, McKibben identifies
the United States as the world's chief polluter and derides its
“materialism”
and “hyperindividualism.” In October 2011 he wrote:
“For
too long, Wall Street has been occupying the offices of our
government, and the cloakrooms of our legislatures…. You could even
say Wall Street's been occupying our atmosphere, since any attempt to
do anything about climate change always run afoul of the biggest
corporations on the planet. So it's a damned good thing the tables
have turned.”

Muslim Groups
In
October 2011, OWS organizers invited
U.S.-based Muslim groups to join the cause. The
first to accept
this invitation was the Hamas-linked Council
on Islamic-American Relations,
whose New York chapter held an October 21 prayer service in Zuccotti
Park. At that event, a speaker from the Islamic Leadership Council
delivered a
sermon on social justice, citing, as a smear against the banking
industry, the Prophet Mohammed's commandment against usury. Members
of the Workers
World Party,
a Marxist-Leninist sect, helped
display signs demanding that the U.S. government “Stop Entrapment
of Muslims.” And
Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab American Association of New York,
said:
“We as Muslim New Yorkers are here today because we are in
solidarity and support of Occupy Wall Street.”

Islamists in the Middle East
In the fall of 2011, Iran's
supreme
leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, lauded OWS for having “exposed” the “corrupt
foundation” of American society, and gleefully predicted that the
movement would “grow so that it will bring
down the capitalist system and the West.” The Deputy Chief of
Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces for Culture and Defense Publicity,
General Seyed Massoud Jazzayeri, likewise characterized
OWS not only as “a revolution and a comprehensive movement against
corruption in the U.S.,” but as a force
that “will no doubt end in the downfall of the Western capitalist
system.”
Further, he framed
OWS as the beginning
of an “American Spring”—akin
to the Arab Spring uprisings that had already toppled three
longstanding Mideast regimes.
Iranian
Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin
Mehmanparast
suggested that OWS signaled the political awakening of the American
people, but lamented that U.S. authorities were “intolerant” of
its peaceful demonstrations. And a website affiliated with the
Islamist terror group Hezbollah
portrayed OWS as a movement that was courageously exposing
the “corruption,
poverty [and] social inequality in the U.S.”

Democratic Party Supporters of OWS:
A number of left-wing
Democratic
political figures have voiced praise for OWS. To cite just a few:

United States Senate candidate and former Obama appointee
Elizabeth
Warren
expressed her fervent “support” for OWS and boasted, “I created
much
of the intellectual foundation for what they [the protesters] do.”

Illinois congresswoman
Jan
Schakowsky
cast OWS as an “unstoppable” movement that “has made a real
difference” in focusing Americans' attention on the problem of
“inequality.”

New York city councilman (and former Black
Panther) Charles
Barron
was “very
impressed” with OWS, predicting that the movement would “catch
on like wildfire” because “conditions are ripe for revolution,
for radical change.”

Allies
in the “Nonpartisan” Media
Several
individuals working for the New
York Times,
National
Public Radio,
and NBC
News
have been caught quietly promoting
the very same OWS movement which those outlets have largely portrayed
as a spontaneous uprising independent of any powerful, organized, or
well-financed influences.

For
instance, New
York Times
freelancer Natasha Lennard, who according
to Politico.com “played a pivotal role in the media narrative of Occupy Wall
Street,” participated in a panel
of radicals discussing the theory, strategy and tactics of the OWS
protests.

National
Public Radio
host Lisa
Simeone
worked as a spokeswoman
for “Occupy DC”—a
chapter of the OWS-affiliated October
2011
movement—in
violation of the network’s ethics rules which forbid
employees
from “engag[ing] in public relations work, paid or unpaid.” When
questioned by reporters about the matter, Simeone said
that because she was a “freelancer” for NPR, she was not
obligated to abide by the restrictions, adding:
“Our main focus is that we are against corporatism and
militarism.... [W]e are not going to stop acts of civil
disobedience...” Upon learning of Simeone's involvement with the
movement, NPR fired
her.

In
one of many
emails contained on a private listserv
which was leaked to BigGovernment.com, MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan advised
OWS protesters on how they ought to craft their press statements. “I
love what you're doing,” he said, noting that “we have an
opportunity to convert the energy that you have already
harnessed … where we can push collectively for a Constitutional
Amendment to get the money out [of politics].”

In yet
another leaked email, Rolling
Stone’s
Matt Taibbi transmitted a distilled
version of his article,
“My Advice to the Wall Street Protesters,” wherein he expressed
his “love” and “support” for the movement, and condemned the
“unparalleled
thievery and corruption” of Wall Street.

Another
media figure, the infamous racist and MSNBC host Al
Sharpton, made a very public appearance at an OWS rally, where he
shouted:
“It's time for us to occupy Wall Street, occupy Washington, occupy
Alabama. We've come to take our country back to the people.”

A key source of financial
support for OWS is the online
funding
website Kickstarter. Additional
donations are funneled
through a site called WePay,
and still more money is contributed by
visitors to OWS “occupation” sites. By the beginning of November,
the movement had raised some $500,000
altogether;
one of the more prominent donors was filmmaker Michael
Moore, who gave
$1,000
(of his $50
million net worth)
to the cause.

On November 20, 2011, it was reported that Peter Dutro, one of a select few OWS members on the movement's powerful finance committee (which controlled the $500,000 in donations which OWS had theretofore collected), stayed overnight at the five-star, $700-per-night W New York-Downtown Hotel, even though he resided only a short taxi ride away in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

DEATHS AT OWS, AND THE SHUTDOWN OF SOME ENCAMPMENTS

On
November 10, 2011, OWS's first homicide was recorded, when a
25-year-old protester at Occupy Oakland was fatally shot by
a man whom other demonstrators described as
a “frequent resident” at the camp. The killing prompted Oakland mayor Jean Quan to
direct an open letter to the Occupiers, asking them to leave peacefully on
the night of November 10; the protesters initially ignored
the request but eventually were evicted by police in riot gear.

The November 10 homicide was one of eight
deaths that occurred at OWS encampments between late October and
early December of 2011. The others who died were: a
35-year-old military veteran who shot
himself to death at Occupy Burlington; a man in his 40s who died
from a combination of drug
abuse and carbon monoxide inside a tent at Occupy Salt
Lake City;
a man who died of unknown causes inside his tent at Occupy
Bloomington; a
53-year-old man at Occupy New Orleans who died
from the effects of prolonged
alcohol abuse; a woman in her twenties who died
of an apparent
drug overdose at Occupy
Vancouver;
a man in his twenties who was found
dead inside a tent at Occupy Oklahoma City; and a young man known
to be a drug addict who died
at the Occupy Denton encampment
on the grounds of the University of North Texas.

For a chronological overview of all the deaths that have occurred at OWS sites, click here.

On November 10, 2011, Portland, Oregon
mayor Sam Adams, citing an unacceptable level of lawlessness in and
around the OWS encampments in his city, ordered
the demonstrators to disperse by 12:01 a.m., November 12. “Crime,
especially reported assaults, has increased in the area,” said
the mayor. “Occupy has had a considerable time to share its
movement's message with the public but has lost control of the camps
it has created.” On November 13, police in riot gear enforced the mayor's order, arresting some 50 resisters in the process.

Salt Lake City officials likewise asked
members of the local Occupy protest group to start packing and leave the park permanently after a man (mentioned above) was found
dead inside his tent on November 11, having succumbed to a combination of a drug
overdose and carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a space heater in
the tent. “We can
no longer have individuals camping on our streets,” said Salt Lake police chief Chris Burbank.
“We as a city just cannot tolerate this going on.” The following day, police officially terminated overnight-camping privileges for the protesters at Pioneer Park.

In
the early morning hours of November 15, 2011, New York City mayor
Michael Bloomberg ordered the
NYPD to raid OWS's Zuccotti Park encampment and evict all the
protesters, on grounds that health
and safety conditions in the crowded plaza had become “intolerable.”
The National
Lawyers Guild issued
an
emergency
appeal to block the mayor's action, but a New York judge upheld
the Bloomberg's decision, saying that the protesters’ First
Amendment rights did not entitle them to camp out indefinitely.

"MARCH OF THE 99 PERCENT"

On
November 17, 2011, OWS held a
“March
of the 99%,” a nationally coordinated, multi-city day-of-action in conjunction with labor unions
and community groups. The unions that participated in this event
included
the United Federation of Teachers, the SEIU and its affiliate Workers
United, the Communications Workers of America, the Transit Workers
Union, the United Auto Workers, and the Professional Staff Congress
of CUNY. The day's largest demonstration was an all-day affair in New York City, where some 400 people were arrested. Rallies were also held in Boston, Columbia (South Carolina), St. Louis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Portland (Oregon).

PLEDGE TO PERSEVERE:

After the New York protesters were evicted from Zuccotti Park by Mayor Bloomberg, Kalle Lasn—the individual most responsible for having launched OWS earlier in the year—stated that "Bloomberg’s shock-troop assault has stiffened our resolve and ushered in a new phase of our movement." Added Lasn:

"The people’s assemblies will continue with or without winter encampments. What will be new is the marked escalation of surprise, playful, precision disruptions—rush-hour flash mobs, bank occupations, 'occupy squads' and edgy theatrics.... We will regroup, lick our wounds, brainstorm and network all winter. We will build momentum for a full-spectrum counterattack when the crocuses bloom next spring."